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General Whitman and his Cold War Boyfriend
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my parents hated books. Comic books were suspect enough -- but full-sized books would brainwash me into believing atheism and evolution keep me away from healthy...
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The Magic Sword
On Saturday afternoons in the 1960s, if there was no sports match on, WQAD tv played science fiction movies. Usually the same movie. I saw snippets of it many times -- ten or fifteen minutes in...
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"Merry Happy Something": Watch it with the Family Bigot
Spending Christmas with The Relatives on the other side of the world is always stressful: stuck in a house for two weeks with no exercise unless it's nice enough to jog outside, forced to...
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"That Wilkin Boy" and Other Beefcake Wonders of the Archie Universe
The Comic Cave in Rock Island, like most other comic book stores, was devoted to the Marvel and DC lines. If you wanted something else, you had to sort through the "Other" bins, which consisted mostly...
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Wild Things: The Gay Art of Maurice Sendak
Adults like to think of childhood as a blissful Eden, a period of endless joy, unblemished by anxieties over money or sex or death. But they're wrong. Childhood is terrifying and painful, crowded...
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"With Love": Hispanic Comedy Romcom with Gay, Bisexual and Nonbinary Characters
With Love on Amazon Prime. Dumb title for a Christmas romcom, but I thought I saw two guys hugging on the icon, so we'll give it a try.Scene 1: Establishing shot of Portland, Oregon. Nochebuena...
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"The Witcher": Everyone Dies, and a Mutant Has Sex, in a Dour, Gray Medieval...
December 23rd, 2021. Hulu, Vudu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus, and we've completely run out of tv shows to watch, except for the second season of Alex Rider and some old Simpsons episodes....
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"Duncanville": Is the Fox Sitcom More "Family Guy" Homophobic or "Bob's...
The families in Fox animated sitcoms come in two varieties: the Family Guy (FG) type hate each other and rarely interact except to exchange barbs, and the Bob's Burgers (BB) type like each other and...
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The Top 10 Dead Hunks of "The Witcher"
Bob liked the first episode of The Witcher, so we've...ugh...continued to watch. It gets better -- the color palette expands, so we see mountains and forests; there's some comedic relief; there's...
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"Anxious People": Androgynous Cop Negotiates a Heartwarming Hostage Crisis
Anxious People, a Swedish limited-tv series about a hostage crisis, is tagged as "heartfelt,""sentimental," and "feel-good." How could a hostage crisis possibly be "feel-good"? Who cares if there...
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Seven Brothers: Homoerotic Rowdiness in a Finnish Sauna
I'm not a fan of the Kalevala, the Greatest Work of Finnish Literature: it's completely heterosexist, all about gods searching for wives (except maybe for a gay subtext in the teenage Kullervo).But the...
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"Bless the Harts": A Romance Between a Hunky Redneck and His Truck
Bless the Harts, lasted for two seasons on Fox, features a Southern take on the animated sitcom family: single Mom Jenny, who works as a waitress at the Last Supper (get it?); her hip mother Betty;...
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Kitz: Beefcake, Gay Characters, Glitz, Revenge, and the Austrian Alps. Happy...
Kitz sounds like yet another teen drama with a Netflix-patented single-syllable title and a lot of lies, secrets, and silence. Nothing wrong with that. It's set in Germany, so there might be some...
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"Velvet": Deliberately Misleading Plotlines in the Fashion World of 1960s Spain
I was recommended Velvet, about fashion designers in Spain: beefcake and a gay character (implied, not out, since it's set in the 1960s). But ok, I could use some Devil Wears Prada combined with...
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"Chicago Party Aunt": A Halloween Party at the Best Gay Bar in Chicago
Free spirit paired with stick-in-the mud, "life is a banquet" paired with "that's not a good idea", "it's only 2:00 am" paired with "I have a big test tomorrow," has been traditional comedy since the...
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"Move to Heaven" Tackles a Gay Couple
Move to Heaven is a Korean drama about three "trauma cleaners" who clean the houses, apartments, or rooms of the deceased, and deliver a box of mementos to the surviving loved ones: Geun-ru, who is...
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"Crossing Swords": The Gay Wedding Episode
Crossing Swords is an Adult Swim-style raunchy animated comedy parodying Medieval romance. The schtick is that all of the people are pegs, with no arms or legs. When they hold something, it appears...
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"Grand Crew": A Group of Friends Faces Homophobic Panic in a Gay-Free Silverlake
Grand Crew: a group of five friends hang out while looking for love. The shtick is: they're black. I wonder if they can be divided into Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, and company. More importantly,...
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"American Auto": Workplace Sitcom with the Possibility of Gay Characters
American Autos. Hulu dropped two NBC mid-season replacements (they still have those) at the same time, and I'm home sick today, so I'm reviewing both. I don't hold out much hope for this one, since...
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"Wonder Tales from Baltic Wizards": My Memory of a Good Place
When I was an undegraduate at Augustana College, an ongoing struggle was to find a quiet, secluded study carrell in the library stacks -- one facing a window, far away from other carrells, and where I...
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